Episode Information

Review

This episode was a little slow, but provided some background about the
pulse and more friction between Max and Logan.

Max and Logan had planned a "country" get-away, leaving the city for
fresh air, campfires, and s'mores. Logan has his job in mind,
however, so he takes them to a small town, Camp Haven, where he can
track down a possible informant. Camp Haven was a resort town before
the pulse, but now it is a small, insular community very wary of
outsiders. Nevertheless, Logan has rented a quaint house from the
town doctor and her young nephew, Sage.

Max was not aware of Logan's ulterior motives and blows up when she
finds out. She makes him pursue his job on his own, while she
relaxes. These leads into two separate storylines for awhile. Logan
is trying to find a former Seattle police officer who may have been
involved with, or know information about, the massacre of 18 unarmed
civilian protesters shortly after the pulse. That police officer is
now the sheriff of the town. When Logan meets him, he denies that
he's the person Logan is talking about.

Meanwhile, Max is trying to relax, but her seizures have suddenly
picked up and are more severe than usual. She and Sage end up bonding
during one of her attacks, and then later they hang out together.
Sage is a little odd, and over the course of the episode, Max pieces
together his history, which even he doesn't know. Just after the
pulse, some of the town jerks decided that the foreign family that
lived in town must somehow be to blame for the pulse. These men
attacked and beat the husband and wife and set fire to the house.
Sage was the couple's child, who was hiding in the closet. He was
barely more than a toddler at the time, but he managed to get out of
the burning house. The town doctor found him in the woods and took
him in. The rest of the town believes the fire was accidental and the
whole family was killed; only the doctor and the attackers know the
truth (they deduced Sage's identity).

The sheriff visits Logan at the rental house and reveals that he is
in fact the police officer Logan is looking for. However, he denies
that the people in question were massacred. He provides a lot more
detail and color to the events that happened just after the pulse.
Society was in shambles, and people were scared. First, they began
attacking and killing people that were "different", then they began
looting in general. The police had the impossible job of trying to
maintain order and protect people, despite being attacked themselves,
and so sometimes they might have gone too far. Intellectually, I can
imagine that anarchy must have developed after the pulse, but his
description makes it much more real, especially since he includes
small, anecdotal details on an individual level. He denies that the
police committed a crime by killing the people. Logan is unmoved by
all this and stands firm by the fact that when the people were killed,
they were unarmed, and so the police massacred them. Logan wants to
know who gave the order and who did the actual killing. The sheriff
says he doesn't know.

Max's and Logan's separate investigations occasionally cross, and the
tension between them increases. Max is on edge because her seizures
have been so bad and so frequent. Logan is on edge because he's back
in his wheelchair again. Everything that one of them says to the
other, the other interprets as being some kind of insult.

Things come to a head when the murderers of Sage's parents decide that
Max and Logan know too much and come to confront Logan at the house.
From previous encounters with them, Logan knows to arm himself with
his pistol; good thing he has it, because Max's seizures have
incapacitated her. Sage looks after her. The men demand that Sage be
turned over to them (we're not sure what for), but Logan refuses.
Coincidentally the sheriff arrives and asks the men to leave. They
wrestle with the sheriff and shoot him. Then they leave, with the
explicit intention of returning. (Frankly, I didn't catch the reason
why they were leaving, but it seemed stupid - why wait until someone
notices the sheriff is missing?)

Just before the sheriff dies, he tells Logan he doesn't know who
ordered the civilians to be killed, but that they "all" did the
shooting. This is a really unsatisfying ending to Logan's quest, and
it happens in just a few seconds. Logan knows the men will return, so
he sets up so traps for them, a la MacGyver. Max is still out
of commission, so it's up to him to fend them off, with a little help
from Sage.

The men return after dark (just what were they doing?). True to
character, Logan warns them he will use force for defense, but then he
wastes no time using it. He set up the sheriff's abandoned SUV to
explode (with a trail of gas, something a recent episode of
Mythbusters showed wouldn't actually work), and then
uses his shotgun to good effect. However, there are several men, and
they eventually get up to the house and begin breaking in.

During the fighting, Sage has flashbacks back to the original attack
on his parents, which adds even more urgency to the scene and nearly
incapacitates him. Logan finally manages to kill the last of the men,
but not before he starts a fire in the house. Sage unfreezes and gets
the fire extinguisher just in time.

At the end of the episode, surprisingly few questions are asked by the
townspeople. After all, their sheriff and four other men are dead.
And the four men were killed by a guy in a wheelchair? I guess there
was enough evidence to support Logan's story. Sage now knows the
truth about his family and past.

This episode suffered from being pretty slow to get going and from the
fact that its consequences didn't mean much. I suppose it was good
that Sage learned the truth and the murderers got their comeuppance,
but those effects were only felt in the town. There weren't really
any consequences for our main characters or the series as a whole.
This fact isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the episode also wasn't
hugely engrossing, either.

One of the good points of the episode was more description of what
things were like after the pulse, which I mentioned earlier. The
other good thing was the continual development of the relationship
between Max and Logan. As I said earlier, they were snapping a lot at
each other because of their personal problems. But we also saw some
of the happy side of their relationship when they were shooting pool
at the bar. Of course, that turned into a fight with the town jerks,
which brings up another issue between them: just what exactly are
their roles vis a vis each other? The jerks begin cat-calling Max, so
Logan does the chivalrous thing and tries to get them to stop. Of
course, they don't take Logan seriously because he's in a wheelchair,
and we and Logan know Max is perfectly capable of taking care of
herself, as she kindly demonstrates. Does she want Logan to stand up
for her this way? It's uncomfortable for both them and us as they
work out their expectations of each other. When Max is incapacitated,
it's gratifying to see Logan take charge and arrange their defense
without hesitation.

Smaller comments: I'm not sure that I think Sage's age worked out
right. In the flashbacks, he seemed to be maybe 3 years old; since
the pulse happened 10 years ago on the series, he should be 13 years
old now. I really don't think he looked that old.

What's up with Max's seizures? She says that their severity must be
from residual effects of the implant she had temporarily in "Rising". Why did the effects take so long
to manifest? This needs to be followed up on, or it will just be a
convenient excuse to take Max out of the picture.